Monthly Archives: January 2022

Clyburn Misleads

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Jim Clyburn (D, SC), in an interview on Fox News Sunday, made the below claim in defense of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together are intended to take the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives of Federal elections away from the States and to entirely Federalize those election procedures. In citing Alexander Hamilton’s (as alleged by Clyburn) statements that elections “cannot” and “should not be left up to the states,” he made this claim:

That’s why the voting rights act was necessary and that’s why the fifth amendment to the constitution, why the 18th amendment to the constitution are necessary—all because it had to go beyond the states to determine.

It’s impossible to determine what “amendments” Clyburn was referencing here: the 5th Amendment is concerned with trials, punishments, and takings; it has nothing to do with voting or elections. The 18th Amendment was the Prohibition Amendment attempting to outlaw liquor; it, also, has nothing to do with voting or elections, and it was rescinded a few years later with the 21st Amendment.

It’s clear, though, that Clyburn, far from misspeaking on the Amendments, was badly misinterpreting Hamilton’s views on elections to Federal office and the relationship between the States and the Federal government regarding those elections.

This is what Hamilton wrote in his Federalist No. 59 essay [emphasis added]:

[I]t will therefore not be denied, that a discretionary power over elections ought to exist somewhere. It will, I presume, be as readily conceded, that there were only three ways in which this power could have been reasonably modified and disposed: that it must either have been lodged wholly in the national legislature, or wholly in the State legislatures, or primarily in the latter and ultimately in the former. The last mode has, with reason, been preferred by the convention. They have submitted the regulation of elections for the federal government, in the first instance, to the local administrations; which, in ordinary cases, and when no improper views prevail, may be both more convenient and more satisfactory; but they have reserved to the national authority a right to interpose, whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety.

He introduced that discussion with this, in his lede [emphasis added]:

The natural order of the subject leads us to consider, in this place, that provision of the Constitution which authorizes the national legislature to regulate, in the last resort, the election of its own members.

The States, according to Hamilton, are to set their own rules for how their own representatives and those of their citizens in the Federal government will be elected, and the Federal government is to act in the last resort and only under extraordinary circumstances, most assuredly not in the first, or even merely default, resort. Clyburn’s touted bills would go beyond that, and make the Federal government the only serious determiner of how each State will determine its representation.

The Federal government, according to the Progressive-Democrats, will tell us citizens who it will permit to speak for us to it. We average Americans, after all, are, in the words of Herbert Croly, one of the modern Progressive movement’s founders,

morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [our] responsibilities as a democrat.

Walensky Fails

Posted on by
Reply

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky was asked on Bret Baier’s Fox News Sunday episode last Sunday,

Do you know how many of the 836,000 deaths in the U.S. linked to COVID are from COVID or how many are with COVID, but they had other comorbidities? Do you have that breakdown?

Walensky proceeded to weasel-word her answer and segued to the only talking point she could remember, that everyone must get vaccinated and boosted and get their children vaccinated, too, as soon as they’re eligible. Only toward the end of her off-topic response did she reveal her larger failure:

Yes, of course, with Omicron we’re following that very carefully….

And then she said she didn’t have even those data for the Omicron variant—they take “weeks” to gather….

However.

Why hasn’t she been following this matter, collecting these data, since the Wuhan Virus first arrived? Walensky has, or her staff has—or should have—2 years of these data, for the first Wuhan Virus (which, in truth, is Robert Redfield’s failure); a year or more for the Delta variant, which is on her watch; and more than “weeks” for the Omicron variant.

Beyond Baier’s simplified question, of sort-of necessity in a single segment of several in his program, however, there are four mortality categories of interest, and those four should be of interest to CDC:

  • Those for whom the virus was the sole cause of death
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the virus was the primary cause of death, but the comorbidities were contributing factors
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the comorbidities were the primary cause of death, but the virus was a contributing factor
  • Those with comorbidities for whom the comorbidities were the sole cause of death, and the virus was merely present.

The CDC is ignoring all of that.

Congressman Jordan Demurs

Posted on by
Reply

Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) has declined Congressman and Chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Bennie Thompson’s (D, MS) “request” to appear before that J6 committee. His letter carrying his decision to Thompson laid the matter out in no uncertain terms.

Leaving aside Jordan’s notice that the J6 committee’s summons of Jordan (and of Congressman Scott Perry (R, PA), I add) is an assault (Jordan used “pry”) on a sitting Congressman’s deliberative process informing a Member about legislative matters before the House is an outrageous abuse of the Select Committee’s authority, he laid out a number of other reasons for his decision.

As you well know, I have no relevant information that would assist the Select Committee in advancing any legitimate legislative purpose. I cannot speak to Speaker Pelosi’s failure to ensure the appropriate security posture at the Capitol complex in advance of well-publicized protests on January 6, 2021. I cannot elaborate on former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund’s statement that a concern about “optics”—following widespread calls from Democrats in 2020 to defund the police—contributed to the limited security response. I have nothing to add to the bipartisan, comprehensive findings of the Senate investigative committees or to those issued by federal inspectors general. I cannot testify about the Justice Department’s ongoing law-enforcement efforts, although I am aware of reports that the FBI has determined the violence was not coordinated or part of any “organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.”

Jordan, in his letter, also took notice that the J6 committee seems superfluous (my term), since House Democrats have already determined the committee’s outcome:

House Democrats have already prejudged the results of the Select Committee’s work, declaring in their February 2021 impeachment brief that President Trump is “unmistakabl[y]” responsible for the events of January 6. Democrats have accused their Republican colleagues of “sedition” and called them “traitors” for objecting to Electoral College results in certain states—an official action taken pursuant to federal law, and the same objections that you and other senior House Democrats made following the 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections.

He also laid out individual Progressive-Democrat committee members’ dishonesty:

  • In a widely distributed letter, you falsely accused former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik of attending a meeting in Washington on January 5, 2021, when Kerik was actually in New York City.
  • During a business meeting to consider holding our former colleague Mark Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the Select Committee, doctored a text message I had forwarded to Mr. Meadows.
  • During the floor debate on the Meadows criminal contempt resolution, Representative Jamie Raskin, another member of the Select Committee, falsely attributed a second text message to a “lawmaker” when in fact it was not sent by any Member of Congress.

Jordan is being polite. Speaker Pelosi’s (D, CA) J6 committee is not just the cudgel for smearing Republicans that he terms it; it’s a kangaroo court being used to assault an opposition party and attempt to delegitimize it through innuendo, ad hominem, and outright lie.

Jordan’s letter can be read here via Fox News.

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

Posted on by
Reply

With the pseudo-negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program going the way they are, President Joe Biden, of the Biden-Harris Presidency, is rapidly coming to the first of two moments of truth.

The first is whether Biden-Harris will fold in the talks—he is, after all, consigned by the Ayatollah to the kiddie table where he’s to be seen and not heard by the adults in the room—and give Khamenei everything he wants just so Biden-Harris can come home claiming a deal, however disastrous.

That, though, is a moment of lesser truth. The greater truth moment will come after. As Dubowitz and Kroenig put it in their op-ed at the link,

A nuclear-armed Iran would cause further proliferation as regional powers like Saudi Arabia build their own bombs.

But that’s a lesser truth, also, for all that it’s a greater one than the first. Dubowitz and Kroenig also have this:

It might take a year or two to fashion a functioning nuclear warhead that is deliverable on a missile, but once the clerical regime has enough weapons-grade material, the game is over.

The nuclear warhead doesn’t have to be delivered via missile, though. There are a variety of ways to…truck…such device into Israel.

In the event, too, Iran is likely to wait until it has four or five nuclear warheads, since that is what it will take—and all it will take—to destroy Israel as a polity and as a people. And Iran will strike the moment that fourth or fifth weapon becomes operational.

Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former President of Iran and then-Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, on World Al-Qods Day in 2001, as cited by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

If one day, he [Rafsanjani] said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel’s possession [meaning nuclear weapons]—on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam.

And here is the greatest moment of truth for Biden-Harris. Will he, can he, make

the fateful choice between allowing the clerical regime to become a nuclear-weapons power and using military force to stop it.

Will he make the military strike that Dubowitz and Kroenig suggest will be necessary to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons?

Sadly, Biden-Harris doesn’t have it in him to make the strike. The most we can hope for, and it’s a very thin reed given his and his Progressive-Democratic Party’s open hostility toward Israel, is that Biden-Harris will stay out of the way and let Israel and Saudi Arabia (the latter very sub rosa) conduct the strike.

Brinkmanship

Posted on by
Reply

ME Sarotte thinks Putin has bought into the concept of a 30-year-old betrayal of a commitment by a past US President to a past Russian President to not expand NATO east to include nations that used to be under Soviet domination. Sarotte says that’s the basis for Putin’s current brinkmanship; he’s merely trying to redress that betrayal, as NATO has, indeed, accepted erstwhile Soviet-dominated (even occupied) nations into NATO.

I think it’s hard to take seriously Sarotte’s view. More likely, it seems to me, is that Putin merely is putting that out as a public rationale. The most likely case for his seeming brinkmanship is that Putin doesn’t see his behavior as brinkmanship at all. On the contrary, he’s convinced—rightly or wrongly—that Biden-Harris will fold in the moment of truth.